Hi all,
Our Decentralized Futures grant was just announced, and I wanted to take the opportunity to provide an update on what we’ve been working on the past months 
Scope of Work
Our grant has three (although we split it into four) different verticals:
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Polkadot Developer Hub Coordination - We will lead a new Polkadot developer hub, which we see as a central and core part of providing a refreshed image for developers building on Polkadot. Currently, Polkadot offers many different sources of information for developers. Some examples are Polkadot Build Wiki, Substrate.io, XCM Docs and ink Docs. In addition to the fact that some of this content is outdated, sharding content creates a confusing experience for developers. If a developer asks, “How do I start building on Polkadot?” there is no single “source of truth.” The Developer Hub aims to solve that by providing clear development paths with up-to-date documentation and pointing developers the right way. We expect many different contributors to this hub, but PaperMoon will play a pivotal role in coordinating everyone and ensuring this moves forward
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Ecosystem-related Documentation - We will focus on contributions around ecosystem-related content. As a person who has been in this ecosystem for over 4 years, there are many things you need to know just from experience or by trial and error. There are a lot of tools, processes, best practices, and other things that are undocumented or not properly documented in a single place. Furthermore, many projects/tools use the GitHub README as a documentation source, which is a terrible developer experience. Therefore, we will work on addressing such issues by creating documentation related to (among other things): - How to onboard to Paseo Network
- How to use Chopsticks
- How to get started with Zombienet
- How to integrate with AssetHub (XCM, register assets)
- How to open XCM channels with other Parachains
- How to use the XCM Asset Transfer API
- Many more…
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Ecosystem-related Support - Another part of our ecosystem-centric efforts is around Hackathons. We will support Treasury-approved Hackathon proposals, helping organizers define the scope and providing hackers with general Polkadot guidance. This applies to both in-person and remote Hackathons. We are already connected with teams like EasyA, Encode Club, AngelHacks, OneBlock+, and local hackathons organized by community members.
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Polkadot China DevRel Initiatives - We will work with local partners such as OneBlock+ to create educational courses and quizzes for students, participate in local hackathons, and produce technical blog posts tailored to the Chinese developer community.
Ramping Up
It took some time to get things started. We needed to hire a new team to work on everything we embarked on contributing to Polkadot from a DevRel perspective. We needed to start making the right connections on all the different verticals: start coordinating activities for the Developer Hub, Hackathon-centric, and China-centric efforts.
In addition, we conducted many meetings to obtain different perspectives and plans from people involved in the ecosystem, such as W3F, Parity, Distractive, Parachain Teams, and Hackathon Organizers.
While our team worked on the first pieces of content, we also worked in parallel on the very early stages of the Developer Hub.
Developer Hub - Informational Architecture
The first thing we need to understand for the new Developer Hub is how content will be structured, and for that, Informational Architecture (IA) is key. IA provides the backbone of a site, helping developers swiftly navigate the content and ensure they can find the information they are looking for.
As Polkadot did not have relevant and up-to-date official developer documentation, the first Informational Architecture exercise we proposed was to reach out to key players in the space and have them generate a title and a short description that would represent the content they would like to see in a Polkadot Developer Hub. There were a total of 14 participants distributed between 2 core developers, 2 marketing, 1 business development, 3 developer relations, 3 from ecosystem teams, 2 technical educators, and 1 product engineering. There were a total of 154 submissions through 18 different categories we identified.
Next, we filtered the content and created cards with the most relevant items for the next exercise, which will help us get closer to a final informational architecture.
Please check the IA Exercise 1 Summary here.
For the next exercise, we will ask key players to organize this subset of cards into categories that they will have to name. We will share the results once we go through it.
Ecosystem Documentation - First Draft Content
In parallel, we also started working on some content related to our scope of work on this front. We’ve created a healthy backlog of things to work on, this includes:
- Paseo Network (done)
- Chopsticks (ongoing)
- Zombienet (ongoing)
- XCM Transfer API
- Onboarding to AssetHub (connect via XCM)
- Register a foreign asset in AssetHub
- Fee Payment XCM Runtime API
- OpenZeppelin Templates
- AssetHub pays in any token that has liquidity (AssetConversion Pallet)
- Try Runtime
- XCM-Tools
- XCM for dApp developers
- … more
We’ve connected with many teams building to make ourselves available to write documentation for them on ecosystem-relevant tools.
At the time of writing, we’ve documented how to onboard to Paseo Network, starting with an overview of Chopsticks and Zombienet and testing with Zombienet. Chopsticks and Zombienet pages are still WIP.
You can check this DRAFT page, which we put together to showcase the content we create while we coordinate the Polkadot Developer Hub.
Polkadot China DevRel
Separately, we’ve worked with OneBlock+ to create Polakdot-specific localized developer courses to help developers in China get started with Polkadot.
At the time of this writing, we’ve outlined and developed a beginner developer course comprising 6 lessons. You can check out all the different lessons on OneBlock+'s YouTube.
Note that we also have to prepare slides and quizzes for each lesson. We host Office Hours and a few AMAs related to the developer courses. All the videos are in the YouTube playlist that was shared before.
A total of 109 developers enrolled for the first lesson, with 500+ average views. However, as of now, only around 20 developers have successfully completed the course. We are looking into understanding why there is such a high dropout ratio.
We are working on an outline for an advanced developer course and will share more information in the next update.
Closing Thoughts
We are super excited about all the work we’ve achieved in just a few months. We’ve also connected with many people who have provided many positive comments and feedback on our progress.
We also wanted to take time to give a shoutout to W3F Technical Educators @radha, @bader, and Parity’s @kianenigma, who were extremely helpful and cooperative in the early stages of the process.
We are always open to constructive feedback that can help us improve on top of our deliverables.